The Dear Hunter

Casey Crescenzo, who handles vocals and keyboards, first launched the Dear Hunter as a personal side endeavor that grew over roughly ten years into a wide-ranging indie prog enterprise. This expansion cultivated an intensely loyal audience through an elaborate, multi-album storyline. The opening chapter appeared in 2006 under the title Act I: The Lake South, The River North. Later volumes introduced an extensive roster of characters and a complex narrative thread that developed in tandem with Crescenzo’s maturing compositional approach. By the 2010s the series approached its intended sixth installment via Act IV: Rebirth in Reprise (2015) and Act V: Hymns with the Devil in Confessional (2016), two standout releases that highlighted Crescenzo’s narrative skill and his talent for blending sincere indie rock anthems with orchestral textures reminiscent of established film-score composers. Outside the main sequence the Dear Hunter also issued The Color Spectrum in 2011, Migrant in 2013, and the science-fiction saga Antimai in 2022.

Previously a participant in the Belchertown, Massachusetts emo band the Receiving End of Sirens, Crescenzo formed the Dear Hunter to house material that diverged from that group’s dense post-hardcore style. At first he intended it to run alongside his other commitments, and his earliest performance under the new name took place as an opener for the Receiving End of Sirens, with those bandmates providing support. He soon departed the ensemble to devote himself entirely to the Dear Hunter. After issuing the self-released EP Dear Ms. Leading as an introduction, Crescenzo composed and tracked the full-length concept album Act I: The Lake South, The River North, which opens with the birth of a boy at the start of the twentieth century and traces his bond with his mother. This marked the beginning of a planned six-act cycle recounting the central figure’s sorrows, relationships, and demise. The record pairs its finely tuned lyrics with chamber-pop arrangements shaped by prog influences, performed almost entirely by Crescenzo himself, although family members and acquaintances contributed drums, keyboards, trumpet, and backing vocals.

To handle live dates, Crescenzo assembled a complete band that included guitarist Erick Serna, keyboardist Luke Dent, and drummer Sam Dent. This configuration recorded the more expansive and orchestral follow-up Act II: The Meaning Of, And All Things Regarding Ms. Leading in 2007, which detailed the mother’s passing and the protagonist’s ensuing pursuit of affection at the brothel where she had worked. In 2009 the group, now featuring Nate Patterson, Andy Wildrick, and Nick Crescenzo, delivered Act III: Life and Death, whose dramatic arc placed the character on the World War I front lines—mustard gas included—where he encountered both his father and half-brother. Crescenzo paused the central narrative in 2011 to release The Color Spectrum, a nine-EP, three-hour work structured around the colors of the rainbow plus black and white.

The band postponed the next chapter further with the 2013 album Migrant while maintaining a regular concert schedule that sometimes incorporated a string quartet; those performances were captured for the surprise 2015 release The Dear Hunter Live, which Crescenzo described as a “thank you” to the project’s devoted supporters. Ahead of Act IV in 2015, Crescenzo completed his first symphony, Amour & Attrition, drawing on Debussy and Gershwin while centering on a male protagonist’s encounters with successive lovers. Act IV: Rebirth in Reprise appeared in September 2015; reflecting Crescenzo’s own circumstances, the record followed the protagonist’s return to familiar settings and his attempt to reassemble his life in altered form. Act V: Hymns with the Devil in Confessional followed a year later. Recorded concurrently with Act IV, the penultimate volume retained a consistent sonic character while tracing the character’s descent into vice and sin before the rebirth foreshadowed as early as Act II. The band toured in support, labeling the run “The Final Act Tour.”

In 2017 the Acts series paused for the EP All Is as All Should Be. A vinyl box set compiling the first five installments was released at the end of 2019 and included the bonus orchestral suite The Fox & the Hunt, a large-scale reinterpretation of passages from Act IV and Act V realized with Brian Adam McCune’s the Awesome Orchestra. After Crescenzo issued his solo debut, the 2020 Honorary Astronaut EP, he returned to the Dear Hunter for the soundtrack to the 2021 short film The Indigo Child, which previewed the next album, Antimai. That 2022 release introduced an original world-building premise set in the fictional city of the title and explored themes of class division, power hierarchies, and religion through science-fiction and fantasy lenses. The following year Crescenzo reunited in the studio with longtime producer Mike Watts for Migrant Returned, a tenth-anniversary reworking that applied a more guitar-driven approach to the 2013 material. The expanded edition comprised the original twelve tracks, additional bonus songs, and The Migrations Annex EP, and it was also reordered to begin with “An Escape” and conclude, like the bonus versions, with “This Love.”